John Lennon

AP Photo/ Robert Freeman- Copyright Apple Corps Ltd.

The Beatles united a generation of young people with their songs, their attitudes and their sense of style, and John Lennon was the thinking man's Beatle. Of the four, he was the Beatle who wrote books, the Beatle who embroiled the group in a potentially disastrous controversy by suggesting in an interview that they were more popular than Jesus, the Beatle who embraced the poetic innovations of Bob Dylan in the mid-1960's and shocked Beatles fans by jumping into performance art, happenings and political protests in the late 60's and early 70's.

He was the Beatle who announced in one of his first solo albums after the breakup of the Beatles that "The Dream is Over" - the dream of community through peace, love, mysticism and psychedelic drugs that the Beatles had encouraged and advertised.

And yet, paradoxically, Mr. Lennon never lost sight of that dream. "The media are saying that the 60's were stupid and naive," he remarked only a month before his death. "But look at how much of what was sniggered about in the 60's has become mainstream - health food, therapies and all the rest. And love and peace weren't invented in the 60's. What about Gandhi? What about Christ? The naivete is to buy the idea that the 60's were naive." — Robert Palmer

Highlights from the Archives

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11th, the television tribute to John Lennon, ''Come Together,'' found a new focus: mourning both a murdered musician and the thousands of victims in New York and Washington.

In the 20 years since his death, Lennon has become one of popular culture's battlegrounds, like Elvis Presley before him or, for that matter, like anyone of sufficient historical interest to attract not only serious biographers, but hagiographers and revisionists as well. It almost seems as though Lennon anticipated this.

After a 14-year legal battle by a California history professor, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has released a new cache of material from a 300-page dossier on the late rock star John Lennon. For all the years of challenge, however, the file contains little, if any, new information about Lennon.

"The Lost Lennon Tapes" was culled from more than 300 hours of John Lennon's taped archives. The series includes interviews, unreleased recordings (including an acoustic-guitar version of ''Strawberry Fields''), songs in various stages of development, jam sessions and other material - some of it dating back to the Quarrymen, Lennon's band before the Beatles - that was made available by Yoko Ono, Lennon's widow.

Yoko Ono's ''International Garden of Peace'' honoring her late husband, John Lennon, transformed three and a half acres in Central Park from a scrubby-looking patch with many dying trees into a softly rolling garden full of uncommon greenery.

November 19, 2014, Wednesday

Discarded parts from the 1958 Rickenbacker that Lennon played on the first two Beatles’ albums will be auctioned, along with other memorabilia including a complete 1963 Gretsch 6120 guitar he used later.